Renaissance Celebration Messages Renaissance

"...we might say that why you do what you do, is more important than what you do. Jesus 'kingdom values' (or, 'beatitudes') turned the cultural values of his day (and ours) on their head. Jesus calls us to radically reorient our lives."

We continue our three-year trek through the Sermon on the Mount (Matthew 5-7) in a series we're calling "Kingdom Manifesto." This month, we looked at the beginning of the Beatitudes (Matthew 5:3-5), and framed out what these verses mean and why they matter today.

“As a network, we’ve been saying a lot that we want to become beautiful kingdom people...people rooted in Jesus’ claim on reality. I don’t know about you, but that feels hard. It’s so easy to say you want that until you’re confronted with some random hard thing on a regular Tuesday. Suddenly it doesn’t feel very good. But we want to build every aspect of our lives on what Jesus says is good, true, beautiful, and satisfying. We want to be a community that is embodying what is flourishing and whole.”
- Christine Lee

We kicked off a three-year trek through the Sermon on the Mount (Matthew 5-7) in a series we're calling "Kingdom Manifesto." This month, we introduced the journey, and framed out what these chapters are and why they matter today.

"God can only love perfectly. God can only love purely." 

At our final Celebration gathering of 2023, Renaissance stopped to worship and remember the season of advent. We heard from four members of our network as they shared on the four themes of advent - hope, peace, joy, and love. 

"It's not that God just wants to help you with projects of self-improvement, or simply make you more moral, or better at following rules. But what I found is Jesus invites us into the kind of transformation that is beyond what we ourselves can imagine ourselves to be."

At Renaissance, we believe storytelling is a sacred act. We believe it's important to tell the truth of our lives, struggles, pains, joys, doubts, triumphs, failures, and more. So, we’re taking a moment to experience the sacred in each other's stories, together moving toward our living, breathing, active God. This month we explored the theme - "A time when love surprised me..." with Jeremy's story.

“Gentleness is who He [Jesus] is. He is tender, He is open, He is welcoming, He is understanding, He is willing, He is accessible, He is merciful, He is compassionate.”

What does it mean to understand Jesus' heart? How does this impact our view of life and faith? In this Celebration, guest speaker Bishop Andrew Williams shares with us at Renaissance.

"Redemptive participation means we don’t hate the world. We’re not protesting it. We’re participating in it with a vision of the way of Jesus. But in order to do that it must come from love. Love must be our motivation."   

What does it look like to model this? What does it look like to be a community living out an alternative way of life? In this Celebration, Jace Rasche finishes out our "A Creative Minority" journey at Renaissance.